"Death by PowerPoint" and Other Similar Afflictions

"Trying to sound really smart is really, really dumb," argues Marcus Schaller, a content marketing strategist, speaker and author of "The Lead Ladder-Turn Strangers into Clients, One Step at a Time." His basic point is that simple, clear language is important.

"You see it every day; puffed up blog posts, white papers, webinars and website copy full of important sounding jargon," he says. "The less of it you understand, the more important it must be."

Corporate/Marketing Speak is a relic of the days before Google and RSS feeds, a time when information wasn’t at everyone’s fingertips. A white paper in 1998 didn’t have to compete with the same avalanche of information as the white paper of 2011. So be clear, he argues.

There's a similar analogy, less about jargon and more about "parading knowledge," though. Most of us attend conferences and trade shows. That means most of us sit through PowerPoint presentations. If you take a survey of conference attendees, you will almost always find that most people think most presentations are unhelpful to some extent, overly-long in most cases and "not so good" all too often.

At the suggestion of a friend, I read "15 minutes, plus Q&A" earlier this year, written by Joey Asher. Basically, the argument is that the reason so many PowerPoint presentations are less effective than they might be is that we all have a tendency to use such occasions to parade our knowledge, and that typically is not helpful for communicating the couple to several points that really can be made in 15 minutes.

So we wander around, "dumping data" instead of reinforcing the couple of important messages we should be trying to communicate. That, of course, assumes the agenda really is to communicate, rather than genuinely obscure matters. There might well be times when the actual intent is to get through a presentation essentially "saying nothing," for some valid business or political reason.

But clarity, in all content, is only partly a matter of communication skill. It also is the result of discipline; the willingness to exclude extraneous material that might impress, but fails to help get across the few points one really wanted to make in a short time.

There are reasons for some of the "wandering around," of course. For presenters at many meetings, the whole reason a person is allowed to attend is to make a marketing pitch for whatever it is that the company sells. Whatever the conference organizer or the audience might prefer, the speaker's job is to make the pitch. In other cases, demonstrating competency is "the pitch." Lawyers and consultants, as well as anybody else selling an intangible product, has to provide some "proxy" for skill which, by definition, is intangible.

If you wonder why attorneys have nice offices and furniture, it is to provide some "proxy" for skill, which a buyer cannot assess accurately. Educational credentials are proxies; so are awards; frequent speaking engagements and so forth. Still, the temptation to parade knowledge can get in the way of a clear, focused, on target talk, speech or presentation that makes one to several points very well.

"15 minutes, including Q&A" is a useful antidote to "death by PowerPoint."

Yes, Even CEOs Speak Human